Charlie Brooker: How to generate net traffic

Once again I failed to read / link to a classic Charlie Brooker piece when it was written. This one is only a month old.

The article, entitled "Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it", relates to the net traffic that is apparently generated when certain key words are inserted (Sexy / Olsen Twins / barely legal, etc).

You can check it out here, but I'd thought I'd include some snippets.

Cue Charlie:

"In this day and age, what with the credit crunch and the death of print journalism and everything, the use of attention-grabbing keywords is becoming standard practice. "Search engine optimisation", it's known as, and it's the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad that starts with the word "SEX!" in large lettering, and "Now that we've got your attention . . ." printed below it in smaller type.

For instance, according to the latest Private Eye, journalists writing articles for the Telegraph website are being actively encouraged to include oft-searched-for phrases in their copy. So an article about shoe sales among young women would open: "Young women - such as Britney Spears - are buying more shoes than ever."

"And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don't just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an "F-pattern": reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side. If there's nothing of interest within that golden "F" zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That's an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions."

The vast number of comments underneath Brooker's piece are well worth a scroll through as well.

They range from the seriously pissed off:

"You are clearly trying to nail that Bill-O'Reilly-of-the-British-media label, aren't you Brooker? Try to remember though, that even Bill O'Reilly understands that occasionally he has to appear normal and make sense. I reckon you were probably thinking of big tits in your squalid bedsit when they were doing the Critical Thinking part of your journalism course."

To the bloody hilarious:

"Eh! Who is this Brooker twat and where are the naked Lohan pictures Google have promised me?"